Attentive Medicine with Dr. Fatou Mbow

 

  🇫🇷 Lire en français → Le prix de l’autorité – Humiliation, vérité relationnelle et signification des « Epstein files » https://fatoufrancescambow.substack.com/p/le-prix-de-lautorite?r=6k7tym 🇬🇧 Read in English → The Price of Authority – Humiliation, relational truth  and the meaning of the  « Epstein files » https://fatoufrancescambow.substack.com/p/the-price-of-authority?r=6k7tym

 

Une réflexion sur Noël, et sur ce que les adultes sont appelés à être pour un enfant.   J’écris ceci avec honnêteté. Non pour provoquer, ni pour blesser, mais parce que je crois que cela importe. Cette année, pour la première fois, j’ai pris deux semaines de repos avant Noël. Ce que j’ai ressenti le plus fortement a été un soulagement – le soulagement de ne pas avoir à partager, cette année, une forme de détresse adulte propre à cette période, qui me semble enracinée dans un malentendu. Je respecte profondément la souffrance psychique. Je donne tout ce que j’ai pour la comprendre. Je travaille avec elle chaque jour. Mais cette détresse particulière m’interpelle. Lorsque la souffrance naît de l’impossibilité de jouer le fantasme de la famille heureuse, à un moment qui n’a jamais été destiné à célébrer les adultes, mais un enfant, alors quelque chose d’essentiel a été mal compris. Noël n’est pas un rituel ; il est le rappel de ce que les adultes sont appelés à être pour qu’un e...

A reflection on Christmas, and what adults are asked to be for a child. I am writing this honestly. Not to provoke, and not to hurt, but because I believe this matters. This year, for the first time, I took two weeks off before Christmas. What I felt most strongly was relief – relief at not having to share, this year, a form of adult distress specific to this period that feels rooted in a misunderstanding. I respect psychological pain deeply. I give everything I have to understand it. I work with it every day. But this particular distress gives me pause. When suffering arises from being unable to perform the fantasy of the happy family, for a time that was never meant to celebrate adults at all, but a child, something essential has been misunderstood. Christmas is not a ritual; it is the remembrance of what adults are asked to be in order for a child to be. I’ve written a longer reflection on Christmas – on a woman who tells the truth, a man who chooses to stay, strangers who offer hel...

🇬🇧 What Is Important? I have often wondered about this powerful desire that human beings seem to share – the desire to be seen. I have not observed this in animals living in the wild. I wonder: is this a desire to be important in the eyes of someone else? And if so, why? When children are not adored by their parents, their lives are clearly at greater risk. But what about adults? What is important? A person? An animal? A house? X + Y = X⁺ If Y is important to X , isn’t it often because X hopes to become “more” – X⁺ – through that relationship? If so, then perhaps what is taken to be important is not the person, the animal, or the object itself, but what X expects to gain from the relationship. If we set aside all usefulness to someone else’s desire, where does real importance lie? Is there an importance in the quality of the relationship , in the accuracy of action within the relationship ? And what is the ground of such accuracy? Is it the awareness of wh...

 

 #regard #respect #drfatoumbow #médecineattentive

Mouvement naturel. En regardant ce mouvement perpétuel – celui que homo sapiens appelle « nuages », « soleil », « mer » – je me suis demandé : quel est le ground de ce mouvement naturel ? Par quoi est-il régi ? Quelle en est la logique ? Je me demande si ce n’est pas la beauté. Homo sapiens pense souvent que la beauté – sa bonté, son intelligence, sa vérité – réside dans une personne, dans une chose, ou dans un lieu… Dans la nature, la beauté me semble autre. Elle est celle d’un agencement, celle d’une relation, celle d’une harmonie. Constamment en renouvellement. Une beauté que nous découvrons, autre que celle que nous avions imaginée. La beauté, d’une justesse relationnelle à laquelle nous sommes invités.

 #DrFatouMbow #attentivemedicine #consciousness #awareness #belief #thought #observation

 #relationsauthentiques #clarté #solitude #présence

  #authenticrelationships #clarity #aloneness #presence

This published page traces the path that led me to attentive medicine – from my medical training and humanitarian work to the simple but demanding question: What is a symptom asking to be understood? A meeting between lived experience and editorial shaping.  

✅ English 🌊 The Number That Dulls the Living I have always had an instinctive mistrust of numbers. They promise logic, but at the cost of a disconnection from the real. Being “good at maths” was supposed to mean something – yet among the “math people” I have met, I have never seen a clarity of goodness. Logic, yes. But nothing that illuminates presence, feeling, emotion, illness, healing. Nothing that illuminates life. A friend once worried that her daughter “didn’t see numbers.” Medicine even gave her a pathology for it: dyscalculia. A wound to love – of self or of another – in the name of functional convention. I understood that child. Numbers have always seemed poor to me, commercial, disrespectful. Then I heard Sven Kull, speaking with  @anneke.lucas  recount that in the organisation of torture where he found himself as a child, the first reduction imposed on him was to become a number. A number instead of a being. As if human history had never ceased to devalue the...

Ce qui “voit” la pensée n’est pas l’œil. Ce qui “entend” la pensée n’est pas l’oreille. Alors qui témoigne de la pensée – qui l’écoute, qui l’observe ? Il semble que ce soit la totalité de la mémoire – l’ensemble du savoir – dont chaque pensée croit être séparée. #DrFatouMbow #attentivemedicine #consciencehumaine #philosophiedelesprit #temoindelapensée #inquiry #mémoire #conscience  

What sees thought is not the eye. What hears thought is not the ear. So what is the observer, the listener, the witness of thought? It seems to be the totality of memory – the whole of knowledge – from which each thought believes it is separate.